The activities of many architects may be readily situated in a specific
context. In such cases, both the meaning of their work and the modalities
of its development are best understood in terms of their personal biographies
and their geographical and cultural backgrounds. This does not hold
true, however, in the case of Jose Cruz, whose work is best seen from
the standpoint of a certain movement – a movement between places,
between activities and between diverse dimensions of architecture. His
oeuvre is tensioned by polarities whose presence generates the system
of coordinates by which we may properly comprehend his work.
BETWEEN
BARCELONA AND VALPARAISO
Cruz
once confided to me that “in Barcelona, I learned to calculate
the length of a beam.” Thus does he customarily exaggerate in
reducing the essence of what he had learned there to a certain technical
mastery. We may safely assume that he learned considerably more than
that during his 17 years in the Catalonian city and his time at the
Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), then in the midst of one
of its best periods. Cruz began his formal training in architecture
at the Catholic University in Santiago following a year of engineering
at the University of Chile, but shortly thereafter left for Barcelona
where he completed his undergraduate studies and began work on a doctorate.
While there he also taught at the School of Architecture with the
philosopher Eugenio Trias, as well as at the Col-legi de Filosofia.
During the same period he wrote for the journal Jano Arquitectura
and started up a professional practice in an old house in Calle Nueva
Santa Eulalia, in the upper part of Barcelona’s Sarria district.
Cruz
evidently never lost sight of what was happening in Chile while he
was away. I remember a chance encounter with him in the courtyard
of the Catholic University’s Lo Contador campus one warm summer
afternoon. It must have been in January of 1978, and he had come to
look up Raul Irarrazaval’s work on Chile’s Central Valley,
which he still remembered and for some reason thought worthy of renewed
interest.
If
I remember rightly, it was in a project for the Spanish post office
in the early eighties that I first noticed Cruz’s efforts to
bring into play a sort of approach based on certain notions taken
from the Valparaiso School. His family connections with Alberto Cruz
Covarrubias and his belief, acquired at a distance, in the value and
originality of the research being done in Valparaiso led Jose Cruz
to construct, bit by bit, his own version of those ideas. The process
gathered force with his return to Chile and the more mature work he
began producing here.
This
tension between a vision born of the technical competence and knowledge
of architectural debates and contemporary ideas gained through his
Barcelona experience, and the impact on him of the Valparaiso School
with its emphasis on research and the particularities of the New World,
run deep in the work and thought of Cruz. It manifests itself as a
fecund double distance that has allowed him to face the challenges
of architecture with originality and create a language of his own
that, though not claiming to be a new departure, has become more and
more recognizable. Cruz’s ability to both resist that tension
and channel it as a driving force behind his architectural production
is fundamental to an understanding of the nature and results of his
work.
BETWEEN
FOUNDATION AND CRAFT
Cruz
has developed his oeuvre in the day-to-day world of professional commissions,
remaining true to his own dynamic. Yet this has not prevented any
of his creations from generating its own discourse that serves as
the work’s explicit foundation. This is a fundamental requirement
for Cruz and is expressed in his many projects, resulting in a series
of manuscripts and drawings that reflect the observations, points
of departure and internal structures governing his works. These manuscripts
have often accompanied the publication of his productions as testimony
to the thinking that gave rise to them. It is on the basis of these
ideas that Cruz insists in explaining his works, for it is precisely
those terms that define the works’ context and allow them to
be properly understood and judged (1).
It
might be thought that such an exercise is the mark of a theoretical
architect. And in a sense this is true, for there is always a certain
theoretical dimension, or at least a theoretical position, in Cruz’s
work. But such a view of his output would be incomplete, for Cruz’s
theoretical starting point is always counterbalanced by a clear and
mature knowledge of his craft expressed in a consummate conception
of structure and a mastery of construction, among other ways. His
works often display a complex technical dimension that is deliberately
concealed, as though he preferred it not to be felt. This mastery
of his craft not only lends an essential solidity to his oeuvre but
also imparts to it an additional intensity. His output can hold its
own both in its general concept and its details (2).
Thus,
the works of Cruz reflect the tension between the abstractions of
theoretical ideas and the concrete as manifested in material thinking.
Such a tension is not commonly found in Latin American architects,
and is no doubt one of Cruz’s most fundamental contributions
to the panorama of contemporary Chilean architecture.
BETWEEN
SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE
In
those years when we were both in Barcelona, I remember Cruz devoting
a number of long weekends to sculpting in his workshop in Samalus
on the outskirts of the city. Quite apart from the envy I felt at
his ability to combine this intimate, almost clandestine artistic
activity with his professional work, I could sense how it revealed
a significant aspect of his vocation. One only had to see a few of
these creations to be convinced that they constituted something considerably
more than just a weekend pastime. The exhibitions he has since held
in Chile have revealed this personal facet giving to his artistic
activity its own stature (3).
Sculpture
for Cruz is a way of reflecting on form and material. It is a reflection
that, unlike a commissioned work of architecture, is initiated at
the creator’s own insistence and follows the rhythm of an independent
dynamic, executed directly by his own hands. This is very different
from the conditions in which architectural production takes place,
yet is complementary to it. The relationship between sculpture and
architecture in Cruz is somewhat reminiscent of that between painting
and architecture in Le Corbusier, who saw the canvas as a laboratory
for his architectural activity (4). The relationship
is a sort of abstract field in which one may explore various themes
related to form and space, themes which often give rise to architectural
arguments. A significant part of Cruz’s efforts to infuse his
architecture with an investigative dimension is evident in his sculptural
activities.
This
very brief description of the tensions and distances between significant
places, architectural dimensions and activities is the key to understanding
the position of Jose Cruz as a place where situations originally far
apart have been able to meet, connect and dialog. Through this conjunction
of voyages, tensions and distances we may correctly situate Cruz’s
many contributions to the architecture produced in Chile in the 1990s.
It also serves to explain the inaugural nature of a work like the
Chile Pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville, which helped trigger
a new vision of Chilean architecture in the international panorama.
This conjunction also allows us to understand the technical and architectural
solidity of a series of his works, often in wood, that in addition
to their intrinsic quality have effectively modified the material
sensibility of Chilean architecture. And finally, it enables us to
comprehend the unusual maturity of a recent work like Adolfo Ibañez
University, completed on a tight deadline, whose architectural form
configures the complexities of university life while expressing a
thoughtful relationship with the Andes mountains and the Central Valley
landscape.
Jose
Cruz’s architectural activity may thus be seen simultaneously
as a series of paths that join distant points in contemporary architectural
culture and thought and a particularly fruitful crossroads between
them.
August 2004